Chords and Discords (27 page)

I felt my way about the room. The walls were slick with damp and mould, and stank of the sewer. My fingers touched wood. A door, rotting but still firm where it needed to be, about the hinges
and the lock. There was no window. I must be in the cellar of one of the houses in Ratten Row – perhaps even the one Hugh had been locked in.

I battered on the door, shouted. No answer. I considered kicking the door out, then realised it opened inwards. I battered again. And heard a bolt being drawn.

I jerked back just in time to prevent myself being bowled over by the door. The newcomer was outlined against a candle on a stair behind him. A tall man, cadaverous in ragged clothes.
“Shut your noise!” His temple, I noticed, was bleeding from a wound high on the hairline; dried blood streaked the left side of his face.

“Did she do that to you?” I said, savagely, and launched myself at him.

He was taken by surprise, toppled backwards, but struck out all the same. His fist landed on my side. I gasped for breath, kicked back. He grunted, fell, and his head struck the bottom stair.
Bone cracked. He lay still.

I vaulted over him, scrambled up the stairs in the poor light of the flaring candle. There was no door at the top of the stair – I found myself in another stinking room, lit through an
open doorway on its far side. Moonlight flooded in from a narrow yard. A means of escape lay before me.

Not without Esther.

I turned on my heels. A rickety stair led up from one corner of the room; I could hear drunken voices singing above. No one seemed to have heard my scuffle with the ruffian.

A soft voice called: “Charles? Charles!”

My heart leapt. I glanced about the room. The moonlight slanting in from the yard showed me a door on the far side of the room. I leant close to it and whispered: “Esther?”

She must be close behind the door. She said, prosaically: “I heard you shouting. The door is locked.”

It was not. A stout bar had been wedged across it; the bar was tight and would not shift. I battered at it with the palm of my hand, felt it move slightly. Then it gave way with a clatter;
breathlessly, I stared over my shoulder at the stairs.

No sound but the drunken singing. They could not have heard. I lifted the bar from its sockets and dragged the door open. Moonlight gleamed through a small window high in one wall of the bare
room and showed me Esther Jerdoun; her pale hair was loose about her shoulders, her breeches covered by a long coat. She was holding a pistol. And smiling.

“I anticipated rescuing you, and now you are rescuing me.”

“I wish we were both safe at home,” I said dryly.

“Amen to that.”

I was keeping my distance, not for fear of the pistol but for fear of seizing her and embracing her in sheer relief. I stared at the weapon. “Have you used that thing?”

“Alas, yes,” she said. “It is empty. But it makes a useful club. I hit one fellow over the head with it and none of them have come near me since.”

“I think I met your victim just now.”

We stood looking at each other in the glow of moonlight, both of us smiling. Then she murmured: “Do we stand here talking for an hour or two then?”

I seized her hand. “No. Let’s be out of here!”

We had reached the door to the yard when we heard shouting upstairs and the thud of footsteps on the stairs. What had alarmed them I didn’t know and I didn’t want to stay and find
out. We ran outside. Damn it, Hugh was right – the yard was enclosed. There was no way out except back into the house.

Except –

In front of us was a wall, perhaps ten feet high. In the deep shadow cast by the moonlight, I held out my hands; without hesitation, Esther stepped into them and clambered up on to the wall.
From the top, she reached down for me. I took hold of her hand, scrabbled at the rough stones. The men burst screaming and shouting into the yard as I dropped down the other side.

Another yard, another house. I flung myself against the back door. It burst open.

We were precipitated into a room crowded with sleeping bodies – seven or eight men bundled in grimy blankets on the floor. Esther leapt over them and flung open a door on the far side of
the room. We glimpsed a window giving on to the street, and saw men rushing along to burst in the front door.

“Up!” I said breathlessly, thinking of what Hugh had told me. “Go up!”

The stairs were narrow, uneven and rotten. Following Esther in a rush, I stubbed my toe on every step, fell twice, came out into a room where an old woman sat rocking and moaning over a young
girl wrapped in an old shawl. The room stank of death. Men were shouting below, footsteps clattered on the floorboards on the stairs behind us.

We scrambled up to the next floor, struggling for breath. “Where are we going?” Esther gasped.

“These houses all connect with each other, probably in the attics.”

Up to another floor, crowded with sleeping bodies who mumbled as we accidentally kicked them. The windows were squares of old newspaper pasted on to rotting frames letting in bright moonlight.
The stench of urine was appalling. I clambered up again to the attics, Esther close behind me. Half the stairs were missing – I put my foot in a gap and pitched forward. Men burst into the
room behind us. I dragged my foot out of the hole, crawled on and up.

Behind me, Esther cried out. I glanced back. A man below her on the stairs had hold of her ankle.

She kicked out at him but he held on. I started back to her but she called: “Go on, go on!” Her hands were at her throat; a second later, she swung her cloak in a great arc. Its
folds enveloped her attacker. He yelped, fell back on top of his fellows.

We crawled up the last steep stairs. The attic was as full of sleepers as the rooms below. I ran the length of it, seeing a dark gap in the wall on the far side. A hole had been knocked through
the bricks beside the chimney stack and the gap shored up by beams that looked like old ship’s timbers. As Esther raced past me, into the attic of the next house, I threw my weight against
one of the timbers, felt it shift, tried again. It toppled and I ducked through the hole just as the makeshift lintel gave way. There was a rumbling and a roar, and the wall caved in. The roof
above cracked; slates started to slide and crashed down into the attic.

We stumbled to a halt, stone dust rising around us; I jumped as a slate crashed to the floor behind me. Moonlight gleamed through the new hole in the roof and showed us the contents of the
attic.

It was a treasure trove. Boxes of candles, casks of beer, coils of rope, bolts of cloth. Clothes were heaped in one corner – I spotted Hugh’s coat, recognising it by the gleam of the
huge buttons.

“Stolen goods,” I said. Bedwalters would be delighted to hear of this – if he could get together a band of men audacious enough to raid the house.

“Men on the stairs!” Esther said breathlessly. Voices. We were cut off from our original pursuers by the debris, but the men in this new house were coming to see what was happening.
And the holes in the roof were still tearing apart, albeit more slowly; rafters hung loose, and the lime and horsehair plaster that rendered the roof watertight peeled away and dropped down around
us. Stone dust trickled down the wall.

I seized a coil of rope. “Knock out that window!”

The frame was covered only by paper. Esther seized a slate from the floor and threw it at the window. Remnants of glass behind the paper shattered and fell tinkling into the alley below. I tied
the rope to a full cask in the centre of the attic, dropped the end of the rope out of the window. “Can you climb down?”

“Of course.”

She swung herself out of the window even as the first of the men from below burst in. His way was blocked by fallen rubble from the roof. I saw him snarl and lift his hand. I ducked. A pistol
shot whined over my head. I groped around for something to throw at him, found nothing better than a sackful of candles, tossed them one after another in his direction.

“Charles!” Esther called. “Quickly! Come down now!”

I scrambled to the window, tossed down Hugh’s coat to her. Another pistol ball whistled past my ear, smacked into the stone of the wall and fell flattened to the ground outside. Then I was
over the sill and sliding down the rope, heedless of burns to my hands.

Halfway down, I felt the cask shift. The rope went slack. I fell – but it was barely four feet to the ground and Esther steadied me.

“Run!” I gasped.

We ran. Along the chare. It was so narrow that the moon hardly penetrated it; we stumbled from one wall to another. The cobbles were filthy, littered with shit, human and animal, scattered with
debris that tripped us. But there was the end of the chare, framing a sliver of moonlit Key –

And there was Mary Bairstowe.

She stood in the moonlight like a sour-faced Gorgon. “Take hold of them,” she said. I glanced back, saw men advancing from the houses.

“No,” Esther said, and lifted her pistol. If she thought she could intimidate Mrs Bairstowe with an empty pistol, I knew her to be wrong. But she simply said: “Go to the
devil,” and
fired
.

Mrs Bairstowe did not so much as flinch as the shot whistled past. A man took the pistol out of Esther’s hand. “Thank you kindly, lady, but I’ll take my own back.”

Esther met my gaze and smiled ruefully. “I took the weapon off one of the sleepers in the attic.”

Two or three of the men were laughing. “You’ve led us a fine dance, I’ll say that,” said the keelman who’d taken the pistol. “Best night’s pleasure
I’ve had in a long time.”

“There’ll be more,” someone else said, coarsely.

I turned back at Mary Bairstowe and saw Jennie McIntosh dancing at her heels. Demure, submissive little Jennie, with a smile of pure vindictive pleasure on her face. Esther had been right. She
was sly.

“You saw me earlier,” I said, realising how clumsy I had been. “When I crept into your house to find out what was going on.”

“You should be lighter on your feet,” Jennie said.

“I’ll remember that for next time.”

Esther was close beside me, so close I could feel her warmth, and see the fearless look of calculation on her face. God help us, she had something else in mind; I must deter her from doing
anything rash. We were grossly outnumbered and could not hope to win a fight. Talking, that’s what we needed. I clenched my fist, slowly unclenched it, willing myself to be calm.

“You can go now,” Mary Bairstowe said to the men. They did not move. Except for one lean man, who came forward insolently, sneering at me. He still reeked of gin.

“Nay,” he said, pointing at me. “Not till I’ve had my own back on him.”

“You might not win,” I said, coolly. “Any more than you did the last time.” The men laughed, which clearly enraged the fellow.

“And I’ll have the breeches off the lady!”

Esther caught my arm as I started towards him. “If you think I am easy pickings,” she said to him, “think again!” She leant towards him and said softly, “I do not
fight fair.”

More laughter. Mrs Bairstowe was shouting in fury, trying to subdue them. “Be gone with the lot of you!”

“Nay, lady,” said the man. “We’ve done your bidding. We’ve caught them for you. Now we want our payment.”

They stood face to face, equally belligerent, equally determined not to give way. I was happy to encourage them; if I could engineer a fight between them, we might have a chance to escape. What
might annoy the hard-faced man further? Money, that’s what.

“I knew the plot but not the plotter,” I said to Mary Bairstowe. “You were the one threatening your husband. You want him dead so you can sell the manufactory and go off with
the proceeds. If you can find the deed of course.”

There was silence. The men shifted restlessly.

“What deed?” said the hard-faced man.

“There’s money in deeds,” one of his followers said.

“If you can read ’em,” said another, with a roar of laughter.

“Lots of money,” I said. “That’s why she wants it. And I know where it is.”

“I might want it myself,” said the hard-faced man, softly. I shivered when I heard that tone of voice. Mary Bairstowe did not move; she stood four-square, defying the lot of
them.

I leant towards Esther. “Be ready to run – ”

But at that moment, another figure appeared from the Keyside. Holloway, with a pistol in his hand. The men growled when they saw him; he looked taken aback by their hostility. My heart leapt. If
Holloway was here, then Hugh might not be far away. I knew Hugh’s tenacity; he would not have simply gone home after Holloway got back to town. He would have continued to follow Holloway.
Unless, God forbid, Holloway had got rid of him.

Uneasy and skittish, Holloway bent close to his sister: “The ship leaves tomorrow.”

A ship? Hugh had said the spirits in the house had talked of a ship, and London too. And Shields, where Holloway had spent the day, was the best place to find such a ship. Damn it if Hugh
hadn’t been on to something after all. I said brightly: “You mean the ship from Shields? To London, I take it?”

There were more angry rumbles from behind us; Mary Bairstowe yelled. “I said ye can go! We’ve done with ye.”

“Mebbe we haven’t done with ye,” someone said quietly.

Demure little Jennie McIntosh sauntered forward. I had to admire her – a few short sentences in an unintelligible patois, an argument or two, and she had them turning, albeit reluctantly,
for their chares. Of course she was of their stock; she knew what they wanted. She gave me a saucy look, took Hugh’s coat out of my hands, gave it back to the men. No doubt she had also
promised them our clothes in due course.

Only the hard-faced man lingered to give me a sour look. “I’ll see ye agen,” he said.

“And I’ll beat you again,” I said, cordially.

He snarled at me.

“Now,” Mrs Bairstowe said, when we were alone on the lantern-lit Key. “Where’s this deed?”